15: Sleep Suggestions For Anxious Peeps

Is your sleeplessness freaking you out? I get it! In the past, I struggled with horrible insomnia which was 100% linked to my anxiety issues. Going to bed often stressed me out because I was terrified of not sleeping. This all changed for me because of A Course in Miracles. I learned how to sleep like a baby again and so can you!

Transcript

This is From Anxiety to Love Radio,

The show about undoing anxiety through a course in miracles and other pathways of love.

Gain insights and tools to deepen your awareness of the peace that already exists within you.

I'm your host Corinne Zupko,

Author of the award-winning and best-selling book From Anxiety to Love.

Welcome welcome to this episode of From Anxiety to Love Radio.

Today we are going to talk about sleep.

I get asked about sleep and anxiety so often that I felt totally inspired to do a podcast about it.

First of all,

I'm not a sleep specialist or a doctor and this episode is not medical advice.

I am simply going to share my own issues with insomnia and the teachings of A Course in Miracles that helped me to the point where I now sleep like a baby again.

Thank goodness.

If you are struggling with sleep,

Consider seeing your doctor.

I will talk about why I had to see one.

It's really important that we remember that A Course in Miracles is not against seeing a doctor or taking medicine because we must be where we are.

But gradually,

As we undo the belief in a separate self,

The need for external things falls away.

And we'll talk more about this later.

Also,

If you're currently dealing with anxiety,

Remember you are just in touch with the anxiety that all of us feel on some level due to the belief in separation from our source.

There is nothing wrong with you.

The only thing that we are collectively mistaken about is who we are.

So let's dive in.

The first question that I often get is,

Can anxiety cause sleep problems?

My answer is that anything that distresses you can cause sleep problems if you give it the power to do so.

According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America,

Not only can anxiety cause sleep problems,

But sleep problems can cause anxiety.

So it works both ways on the level of form.

But know that if you're having anxiety right now and you're sleeping fine,

It does not mean that you're ever going to have sleep issues.

And if you have sleep issues,

It does not mean that you're now going to have anxiety.

There are no guarantees in this world,

And in this case,

That's a good thing.

Keep in mind that A Course in Miracles teaches us that all anxiety stems from our belief in a separate self.

I'm going to keep emphasizing this and we're going to come back to this later.

So I'd like to share a little bit about my experience.

In my experience,

The sleep issues that I had in the past were 110% linked to anxiety.

I didn't always have sleep issues.

There were many times when I was having panic attacks and I had no trouble sleeping and falling asleep at night.

But when I went through what I call my adult age episode of anxiety,

Which was around 2009,

Sleep problems entered the picture.

This time period was a really big turning point for me because this anxiety episode actually catapulted my studies with A Course in Miracles even deeper than they had been before.

So I would say that ultimately this anxiety episode was responsible for my healing from anxiety.

But before that happened,

I had sleep issues and I had them big time.

So I want to dive into that a bit now.

During this 2009 anxiety episode,

Which persisted for months,

I started having horrible insomnia.

And I mean horrible in all caps.

I could not sleep at all.

I did not sleep for more than maybe two or three hours per night for a solid year.

And I'm not exaggerating in the slightest bit when I say that.

It's actually just thinking about it.

I still kind of get the heebie jeebies.

It's still making me uncomfortable to think about because it was not fun at all.

The best way,

You know,

Thinking back,

The best way I can describe it is that it felt like I had a light bulb on in my head that I just could not turn off.

It was on constantly.

I thought up until that point,

And I know people sometimes think that when you have insomnia and you don't sleep well one night,

Then you'll be really tired and you'll just sleep better the following night because you're already more sleep deprived.

It doesn't work that way.

And at least it didn't for me.

I didn't sleep well one night and I was exhausted and then I did not sleep well the next night or the next one.

And like I said already,

I was stuck in the cycle for an entire solid year.

Now let's do a mindful pause.

Please watch the voice of fear in your own mind.

If you're sleeping fine,

That fear voice might start saying,

Oh no,

Am I going to have sleep issues for a year?

The answer is no.

If you are currently sleeping well,

You can keep sleeping well.

So I want you to catch any fear thoughts right now and offer them to Spirit,

Who I call your inner therapist.

I know that sneaky,

Fearful anxiety voice well,

And it might be trying to wiggle its way back into your mind.

Don't let it say no and simply do this by just catching the fear thought,

Notice the fear thought and offer it up to your inner therapist and ask for the miracle instead.

That is you not hiding the fear thought or not just brushing it aside.

You're literally catching it and taking it to the light.

If you're sleeping fine,

You can keep sleeping fine.

If you are having sleep problems though,

Even occasional ones,

I'm sharing what I learned to save you time.

And of course,

A Course in Miracles is all about saving us time.

So how do you handle sleep issues?

I'm going to give you some very specific tools shortly.

But first,

My number one answer to heal sleep issues is to instead take a comprehensive approach to healing.

This comprehensive approach to healing anxiety is ultimately what helped me.

And what I mean by this is that a comprehensive approach means that you are working to heal anxiety overall.

You're not just targeting sleep.

You're working to heal anxiety in all areas of your life and you're working to heal it at its root,

Which is our belief that we are separate from God,

Separate from our source.

You're not just fixing a few symptoms here and there like sleeplessness while the belief and separation from our source remains intact.

Because if you fix only the symptoms,

Anxiety is free to return in some other form if that sense of separation is still there.

As I talk about in my book,

Fear is like a leaky pipe.

If you plug up one hole,

So let's say you fix your sleep issues,

Unless you're getting to that core belief of separation and healing it,

Anxiety is free to spring another leak in the pipe elsewhere or show up some other way in your life.

Instead,

When you heal the true cause of anxiety,

Which is our belief in separation from source,

From God,

All effects disappear like sleeplessness,

Panic,

Troubled relationships,

Et cetera.

It's all about healing on this deepest level.

So if you want to heal your sleeplessness,

Commit to healing overall.

This is what helped me.

This is how I was able to recover from this.

And how do you take that comprehensive approach?

This means committing to a spiritual pathway and sticking to it wholeheartedly.

If your path is A Course in Miracles,

Which I'm assuming it is since you're listening to this podcast,

That means doing A Course in Miracles,

Doing what it says,

Studying it and committing yourself to living it.

But obviously I want to give you some specifics for this specific problem.

So I've got a few different suggestions for you to experiment with.

And here is my first specific suggestion.

Number one,

Let the sleeplessness motivate you instead of piss you off.

Here's what I mean.

I can remember dreading bedtime because I started getting afraid of another night of not sleeping.

Like literally,

The thought of going to bed would be very stressful for me.

So rather than stay with that fear and get lost in it,

Let that fear propel you.

Use that fearful energy as motivation to open to spirit more deeply than you ever have before.

Use that fearful energy as motivation to crack open your A Course in Miracles book to study and absorb the meaning behind the words wholeheartedly.

A fellow friend and course teacher,

Earl Purdy,

Once said something along the lines of how you've got to teach the ego that when it kicks up,

You're going to do A Course in Miracles even harder.

And that's what I'm talking about.

So when the problems kick up in the ego realm,

You are showing the ego that that means that you're going to get to work.

So rather than the fear keeping you stuck,

You're repurposing the fear to motivate you to get to work.

Another way of looking at this is that sleeplessness,

Or any problem for that matter,

Means that you've learned really well how to give allegiance to fear.

So we've learned really well how to obey fear.

But now instead,

You can give your capacity for allegiance to spirit to instead be used for your growing allegiance to love.

Our ability to strongly listen to fear can be repurposed to strongly listen to love.

So spirit sees a different healing purpose for everything we've made.

So you can literally say,

Here's a suggestion for something that you might say,

Spirits,

Inner therapist,

Holy Spirit,

I know I am capable of listening and following because I do this with fear.

I give my capacity for allegiance to you instead.

I'm ready for a shift.

So let's move on now to number two,

My second specific suggestion.

Now here,

We're going to deal with a level of form.

And it's a habit that many of us have.

I have had this habit myself.

And I'm going to say this firmly.

I'm going to be your mom for a minute.

Get off the computer and your phone an hour before bed.

The blue light in your backlit device has been shown on the level of form to interfere with your sleep.

I've actually felt the light from the computer affect my sleep many times.

I get that light bulb on in my head feeling and it takes me longer to fall asleep.

And when I finally do fall asleep,

I don't sleep as deeply as I usually do.

I just don't wake up feeling as rested.

Now one workaround is to wear those blue light blocking glasses when you're on the computer at night.

They do work and I do try to wear them as much as possible all the time.

I can share a link to the brand that I use on the show notes for this episode.

It's from anxietytolove.

Com forward slash 15.

That's one five.

But there's lots of different brands on the market that you can use with those blue light blocking glasses.

But please consider committing to a lifestyle change.

Instead of spending the last hour before bed on a backlit device,

Instead read a book,

Maybe A Course in Miracles,

Listen to a podcast,

Or listen to a podcast while straightening up your house.

I don't know about you,

But for some reason at night I get the urge to clean before bed.

So that is a great thing for me to do is to listen to something while I'm straightening up around the house.

So if you do know that staying on the computer late interferes with your sleep and you're doing it anyway,

You might be self sabotaging.

So look at this.

I really encourage you to look at this.

Ask yourself with radical honesty,

What are the benefits that I'm getting out of staying up late?

For instance,

If this makes you tired the next day,

Does that tiredness serve as an excuse so you can avoid something?

Do some digging and look at whatever comes up with your inner therapist with spirit.

Number three,

Grab your journal before bed.

So I'm a huge fan of writing in a journal and I really have found for me that if my mind is just swimming with thoughts,

With things about,

You know,

What's going to happen tomorrow or maybe things that I'm concerned about,

If I get those thoughts out on paper,

They don't need to swim around in my head as I'm trying to fall asleep.

That might actually be,

Maybe you don't need a journal,

Maybe you just need to write tomorrow's to do list so you don't have to keep thinking about it.

But if there's something more emotional on your mind,

Get your journal and get it out on paper.

Get your thoughts out and watch your mind for any fear thoughts as carefully as you can as you're falling asleep and write about whatever it is that's coming up to get it out.

I really found this to be such an incredibly helpful process in clearing my head before bed.

My fourth suggestion,

This is to meet your distress over not sleeping with acceptance.

So have you ever laid in bed awake at night totally restless as you stared into the darkness and you felt that it's like that buildup of emotion in your chest and it makes you want to cry.

You're so upset that you're not able to fall asleep.

And if you've experienced this,

I can totally relate because as I said,

I used to get very anxious and fearful when bedtime was approaching because I was just afraid of not sleeping.

The problem though is that when we get distressed about not sleeping,

That doesn't help anything.

It doesn't help us fall asleep.

It only keeps the ego happy when we get distressed about not sleeping.

So instead,

And I know this sounds really difficult,

But it is possible.

What I did was work on extreme acceptance of the fact that I wasn't sleeping.

So I worked to accept that I was not sleeping rather than getting upset that I wasn't sleeping.

So I would literally say to myself,

Okay,

I'm not sleeping and I am laying here and I'm just going to rest my body and it's okay that I'm not sleeping.

The waves of,

But I'm not sleeping,

You know,

Would come up and I would just breathe through that and again,

Bring my thoughts back to the statement.

It is okay that I'm not sleeping.

I am just going to allow it.

I'm going to simply rest.

It's so important that we meet that insomnia with acceptance and just allowing it,

Being okay with it.

Because if we meet insomnia with angst,

That only exacerbates it.

It's true.

So meeting insomnia with gentle acceptance is going to help you through it.

I know that's easier said than done,

But it's possible because this is exactly how I worked with it.

On to my fifth suggestion.

So my fifth suggestion is to listen to something at night when you're in bed,

To orient your mind to the truth and your truth again is that you are made of perfect love and this can look a number of different ways.

So it might look like that you choose to listen to some spiritual soothing music when you have a racing mind or maybe you listen to A Course in Miracles on audio.

I'm a huge fan of that and you know,

It's funny how listening to something so important like A Course in Miracles might actually put us to sleep and I'm going to come back to this idea in our next suggestion.

I actually made a playlist for you on Spotify.

This playlist,

The first few songs of this playlist were actual songs that I used to fall asleep in the very beginning when I started having panic attacks.

I found these songs so soothing and they still are very soothing to me and again,

You can find the link to this playlist in the show notes page for this episode,

Which is from anxiety to love.

Com forward slash 15.

That's one five.

So let's move on to my number six point and this is actually a suggestion from my mom.

So my mom suggests trying to memorize a meaningful passage from A Course in Miracles when you get into bed.

And I think this is so funny because this puts the ego in a bind.

Either it has to memorize A Course in Miracles passage or prayer that is ultimately leading to its undoing or you're going to fall asleep because your resistance kicks up and you're going to get groggy.

So it's like a win-win situation.

I actually have some suggested prayers from A Course in Miracles on the show notes page.

And if you experiment with this step,

Really try to focus on each word and allow the understanding to come.

So you're really trying to feel the meaning of these words as you work to memorize A Course in Miracles prayer.

If you drift,

If you forget,

If you catch your mind wandering,

Just simply start over without judgment.

You will be surprised how quickly your mind wants to go elsewhere.

Again,

It may want to drift into that monkey mind or it might just tune out and get groggy and this is simply our resistance.

So work as hard as you can on memorizing.

Either you will memorize a beautiful prayer or passage from A Course in Miracles or you will fall asleep.

So check out the show notes for some of my suggestions.

Question number seven would be to experiment with my From Anxiety to Love meditations.

As you might know,

In my book I have a number of meditations in the book and all of those meditations have been recorded to beautiful music and professionally mastered.

The whole album is on Spotify or you can download three tracks of the whole album for free from fromanxietytolove.

Com forward slash meditations.

Again I'll have that link on the show notes page.

Let's move on to suggestion number eight which is about external remedies,

Meaning supplements or medications and my suggestion here is really to just keep an open mind.

So I know a lot of people who feel that it just is not spiritual to take a pill and I'd like to blow this belief out of the water.

Yes,

It's true that healing only happens at the level of the mind.

Yes,

It is true that you are not a body.

Yes,

It is true that you are whole and healed already.

But we must,

Must,

Must be where we are.

If you're saying right now,

I know I'm not a body,

I want you to observe your reaction next time you stub your toe.

Our belief in being a body is quite persistent and we have to be where we are at.

If you are struggling or feeling stuck,

It can be an act of kindness to yourself to help yourself out with some kind of external remedy in conjunction with a doctor.

Now I have a course quote for you.

This quote opens by stating that medicine is a form of magic.

In other words,

It's not healing at the level of the mind,

Which is true.

But it does go on to say in this quote,

It says,

Quote,

It does not follow however that the use of such agents for corrective purposes is evil.

Sometimes the illness has a sufficiently strong hold over the mind to render a person temporarily inaccessible to the atonement.

In this case,

It may be wise to utilize a compromise approach to mind and body in which something from the outside is temporarily given healing belief.

The course then goes on in this quote to say that if we aren't ready for true healing,

If we experience the full power of healing,

It could precipitate us into panic if we are not ready for it.

So what I would do would be to take my medicine with the Holy Spirit.

I'd swallow the pill while offering my belief in it to my inner therapist.

And I just trusted that my need for the pill would fall away when I was ready to let it go.

In my own journey,

When the insomnia I experienced was so bad,

I felt like I needed external help.

And again,

This is like months and months and months of not being able to sleep.

And so I marched myself into a psychiatrist's office and I walked out with a prescription for a sleep aid.

Now when we're so blocked by fear,

It's sometimes really hard to hear spirits and sometimes other people can allow spirit to speak through them if we can't hear for ourselves.

And I was so grateful to this doctor because he put the stop on me modifying my sleep routine to accommodate my insomnia.

So in other words,

I was kicking my husband out of bed,

Making him sleep in another room because I was too concerned about what was happening if he moved or anything like that.

And this doctor was like,

Stop that.

You're not allowed to do that anymore.

Your sleep routine goes back to how it used to be.

And I always looked at that as,

Okay,

So I'm going to follow his direction because I need some help and support here.

And I really looked at the medicine that he gave me as a way to retrain my body,

How to fall asleep.

But while I still worked A Course in Miracles,

Like my life depended on it.

That was the key is that I didn't use the medicine to just stop doing my spiritual practice.

I dove in just as hard as I had been working it,

But currently at that time,

Still getting that support from that medicine.

So as I already said,

I would take that pill with spirit and I trusted that my need for that medicine would fall away when I was ready to let it go.

And it did fall away.

After getting off that prescription sleep aid,

I then used a natural remedy.

It was an over the counter melatonin spray that was created by a doctor.

I used that as a bridge until ultimately I just didn't need anything at all.

And I didn't have to force anything.

I didn't have to be like,

All right,

I'm going to like white knuckle through tonight and not take anything.

It wasn't like that at all.

I didn't have to force it.

Just as I kept turning to Holy Spirit,

I just found at one point I no longer had any interest,

Desire or belief in the pill.

And that was that.

It was done and I never needed another sleeping pill again.

So I want to emphasize here again though that sleeping came back as my fear was starting to get healed overall through constantly working the principles of A Course in Miracles in all aspects of my life,

Not just sleep.

And I outline all these ways in my book.

So I'd like to do a recap here.

We covered a lot.

My main point is to take an overall approach to healing by diving deep into Course principles.

You can't just pick and choose one area to truly heal.

Healing is total.

This is a journey of shifting our identity from our small S self to our capital S self.

So healing is total.

We have to take that comprehensive approach.

Now my specific pointers that I shared with you are number one,

Let sleeplessness motivate you instead of piss you off.

Number two,

Get off backlit devices like your phone and your laptop an hour before bed.

Or use those blue light blocking glasses.

But I think you should get off your phone or laptop an hour before bed.

Number three,

Grab your journal and get your thoughts out on paper before you go to sleep.

Number four,

Meet your distress over not sleeping with acceptance.

Number five,

Listen to something at bedtime to orient your mind to the truth.

Number six,

Put the ego in a bind by memorizing A Course in Miracles passage or prayer.

When you're awake in bed.

Number seven,

Give the From Anxiety to Love meditations a try.

And number eight,

If supplements or medicine can support you,

Allow it to support you.

Take it with spirit without guilt and your need for it will fall away when you're ready to let it go.

So again,

You can find my playlist that I created for you on Spotify,

Some of my product suggestions,

The Course in Miracles prayers that I recommend that you can experiment with memorizing at night.

You can find all of that in the show notes for this episode at fromanxietytolove.

Com forward slash 15.

That's one five.

So now I want to hear from you.

What have you tried that works for you in terms of sleeping?

Please come leave your comments in the show notes at fromanxietytolove.

Com forward slash 15 or hop on over to our Facebook group at fromanxietytolove.

Com forward slash group.

I am sending you so much love.

If you benefited from this episode of From Anxiety to Love Radio,

Someone else you know can benefit too.

The biggest compliment you can give is to share about the show on social media and to leave a review on iTunes.

Thank you so much for doing so.

I read every single review.

Now if you are ready to take your inner work to the next level,

Pick up my book From Anxiety to Love anywhere books are sold and sign up for my free crash course on undoing anxiety with A Course in Miracles.

It's available at fromanxietytolove.

Com forward slash crash course.

Thank you so much for tuning in and I will see you on the next episode.

Reviews

Interesting and insightful! Thank you!